Hyeon Soo Lim

Hyeon Soo Lim (1952-) was a South Korean-Canadian Presbyterian pastor who was imprisoned and sentenced to life with hard labor by North Korea on 16 December 2015 after he was accused of attempting to overthrow Kim Jong-un's government.

Biography
Hyeon Soo Lim was born in the early 1950s in Seoul, South Korea to a family of devout Presbyterian Christians. In January 1986 he moved to Canada as part of a missionary group, and he studied theology at Knox College, becoming a citizen of Canada later on. Lim joined the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Mississauga, Ontario in the Toronto area, having 3,000 members by 2015. In 1996, after a famine in North Korea killed 600,000 people, he took an interest in aid working in the country; from 1997 to 2015, he traveled to North Korea over 100 times. On 31 January 2015 he entered North Korea through the land border with China, and in February he was arrested for "attempting to overthrow the North Korean government and undermine its social system with religious activities" for the past 18 years. On 16 December 2015 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor for these accusations, which included an alleged plot to help North Korean defectors escape to the United States embassy in Mongolia.